Apologies if this is post is not specific to TDE; but honestly, I don't know what to make of it.
I said awhile back that my system seems to be getting unstable, though I cannot determine the causes. This has been happening more frequently over the past year or more ... ever since I mentioned that we had some flooding here (last winter?), and it seemed to affect our network here in this building. (I ought to add, if it is not evident, that I have no control over the network; my complaints too many to repeat here, and may not be related.)
I am still in the process of moving, so I don't have a lot of time to spend chasing down bugs, if that's what this is; I keep hoping that these issues will resolve themselves with a system upgrade.
We have stretches of a week or two where the network seems fine, then out of the blue, suddenly my machine starts freezing up any time I have a network connection; sometimes, indeed, the open connection is there and available, but I have not actually logged into the network.
Usually I disable the network if I am not using it, but when I first boot up, the network is always there and available. And sure enough, my machine freezes up. I just went through this earlier today: when I went online to check my email first thing this morning, it wasn't more than five minutes and the machine froze up; I waited more than half an hour, then decided to do a hard shutdown, and boot up again.
Then, as soon as I booted up and got into the Trinity desktop, the same thing happened, and the system froze up. (I wasn't online, just that the network was available.) At last, it seemed that the machine recognized mouse movement, and I somehow got it running more or less normally again. My mouse icon showed a kind of crosshair icon, which is not actually available to my mouse; so I was a bit puzzled about that.
Then, once I got into my working desktop, started setting up, I noticed that some autostart programs had not started,: audacious, for example, had to be started manually. Also, tdenetworkmanager crashed, and lately has been crashing rather a lot.
After all was set up and I was getting into my work, I noticed in my home folder 5 plaintext files (or at least, they seem to be text files); they are named:
builtins getopt locale signal sys
-- but they have no content. It may be that they are some different kind of file; the system just tells me that they are empty documents.
Nothing like this has ever happened before, and I am concerned about these strange manifestations of files, apparently without any doing on my part. They have rw-r-r permissions, under my user name; which to me indicates that they are supposed to be files that the system must be able to read. For my personal stuff, which the system doesn't need to read, I make the permissions rw only under my user name.
If anybody can offer some insights, of suggestions about how to unravel this mystery, I would be grateful.
Bill
P.S. I just did a system upgrade. I am still running Devuan Daedalus, waiting for the next LTS release, whatever and whenever that will be.